Yesterday, General David Petraeus, CENTCOM commander and architect of the surge strategy in Iraq, collapsed in a Senate Armed Services Committee hearing. Owing to the setting in which the incident occurred and the status of General Petraeus both in the media and the country at large, there was a sense of genuine panic in the subsequent press coverage.
Marc Ambinder wrote a post yesterday that I think explains the tone of the reaction in the press, but also gets at a really problematic trend in American politics. Calling Petraeus “the wars’ head of state”, Ambinder wrote:
This really is Gen. Petraeus’s war – from the Tigris River to the Khyber Pass, from COIN to the MI teams rooting out corruption. If he were incapacitated, the Army would survive, but I think the war would not.
Petraeus has a storied career, larger than life, really, and we talk about him the way contemporaries talked about Patton or Washington. It’s not just his intellect.
Those who support the war have their hopes pinned on that man. And the American people know his face and voice and associate him with their military.
The status of General Petraeus isn’t simply due to his intelligence or capability as a soldier–its also the result of right-wing mythmaking about the Iraq War both as an attempt to brush away ongoing issues in Iraq and help lay the groundwork for an unlikely Petraeus campaign. Despite the ease with which the country has come to adopt the narrative that the 2007 escalation in troops and the shift to a counterinsurgency strategy singlehandedly turned the Iraq War around, it remains untrue. As Michael Cohen helpfully continues to remind us, there were a number of factors involved, including the ethnic cleansing, Sunni tribes turning on al-Qaeda’s affiliate in Iraq and the Sadr ceasefire.
These things are complicated though, and it’s easier both for the press and for the general audience to shoehorn the complicated story of the turnaround in Iraq into a single epic narrative starring a indomitable warrior-hero. The problem with this tendency to flatten these problems into facile narratives is that it dissuades Americans from thinking critically about the implications–both moral and practical–of important policy decisions.
Jon Chait recently cited Gene Healy‘s book, “The Cult of The Presidency” in a piece about people’s unrealistic expectations regarding Obama’s response to the oil spill in the Gulf. Healy wrote, “The chief executive of the United States is no longer a mere constitutional officer charged with faithful execution of the laws…He is a soul nourisher, a hope giver, a living American talisman against hurricanes, terrorism, economic downturns, and spiritual malaise.”
Ambinder’s post suggests Petraeus has become something similar when it comes to war–and frankly that’s a real problem. The policy debate over what to do in Afghanistan was stifled in part by the overpowering heroic narrative of the Iraq War surge, and as that effort falters Americans won’t be the only ones who suffer from the decision to privilege narratives over specifics. These bedtime stories injure Americans’ ability to think critically about what can and should be done to avoid disasters–whether decade long wars in Central Asia or allowing companies to engage in deepwater drilling without emergency countermeasures–because they train us to think that no matter what happens, some knight in shining armor can save us. If there’s anything the Gulf spill and the Iraq War have in common, they both invoked a national sense of helplessness and vulnerability that American elites in particular are unused to feeling, and respond to with what can only be described as grown-ass people crying for daddy. If you want to extend that critique to the left as well as the right–as Glenn Greenwald has, I’m fine with that.
Nonwithstanding Ronald Reagan‘s old joke about the scariest words being “I’m here from the government and I’m here to help,” conservatives have been instrumental in this kind of mythmaking because it offers political advantages, whether we’re talking about dismissing the details of the Iraq War or expecting the president to end racism or “suck the oil out of the Gulf with a straw.” This obsessive hero worship, whether the individual wears a uniform or not, is bad for democracy. No matter what you think of the war in Afghanistan, the decision to press forward or pull back shouldn’t rely on the ongoing availability of reassuring totemic figures whose presence can help us avoid thinking about the risks. Frankly, I think General Petraeus would agree.
— A. Serwer
